When choosing to hire vendor services at work, or for a project, hire vendors who share the same business philosophies regarding contract commitment and client service. If you don't, you will be endlessly fighting word games and politics with your vendors, while setting yourself up for a conflict with your client or employer.



Sharing dissimilar business philosophies doesn't necessarily make one person wrong and the other right. It makes the two dissimilar entities hard to combine into one coordinated effort. Although we all grow and adapt to current business climates, we do not change who we are fundamentally. And it seems that it's these fundamental principles that divide us and make working relationships like a circus act gone wild.

Recently, I hired a vendor from my past to supply bands for me for events that required music that I didn't carry in quantity. It was a company with whom I had philosophical differences in the past. These differences forced a breach in our working relationship. They caused a temporary parting of the ways personally, but that changed with time. We reunited this year to conduct business for two reasons: 1) I was solicited by the vendor to consider new music products now available with that company; and 2) my social event business grew exponentially and I needed quick access to new ideas in entertainment.

We nailed almost every piece of business successfully; the bands were that excellent.

But we ran into behind-the-scenes issues in delivering the product on time, delivering the exact product, the characterization of the product, and the manner in which the product was identified. In order to reach agreements between us, so that the orders could be completed, lots of emails were exchanged, phone conversations scheduled, and private time was spent strategizing so that the relationship could continue in a professional and calm manner. But we are who we are; we don't substantially change.

In the last round of emails, I believe true sentiments were exchanged, and a suggestion that the business arrangement move from a power struggle of philosophies and practices to a suggestion not to work together.

There are elements in our personalities that dictate our behavior in business: our degree of competitiveness, our desire for money, our level of humility and pride, our feeling of gratitude as we become more and more financially successful, and our gender.

You might disagree with the consideration of gender, but I'll give you a current example of why I included this. I saw it happen in the 80s when I developed a radio promotion for the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus called "Feed Your Friends to the Lions." It was an opportunity for radio listeners to win tickets to the circus by naming someone who was causing disruption in their lives to be metaphorically fed to the King of Beasts. Invariably a woman called in to feed a man to the lions. Twenty years later, Donald Trump remarked that he saw gender-driven results with his gender-specific versus mixed gender teams on the first season of The Apprentice. Women seemed to give up power when in conflict with men on mixed gender teams; yet the women won every contest when the teams were gender-specific.

Originally, I saw this as a sign of weakness in women. Recently, I changed my point of view. I now speculate that women don't want to spend the emotional energy it takes to argue ideas with men. For my purposes, with my music vendor, a man, I decided that my time could be better spent finding product and vendors that shared the same concerns, the same commitments, the same ideas of responsibility, and similar communication styles. I did not want to spend any more of my time debating philosophy, business technique, or client responsibility. I wasn't going to change my mind about my principles, nor was he.

Old metaphors sound corny, but there's so much truth in them. A tiger doesn't change its stripes. When I set up interviews with animal trainers and their beasts as marketing director with the Beatty-Cole Circus, I would always warn the media folks that the animals (whether bears, elephants, chimps, or tigers) were still wild. They are trained, not tamed. If they feel threatened, they will strike. Lots of caution and care should be taken when anywhere near animals larger and faster than humans. It's the same when working with people - know their essence, their strengths, their character, and their motivations. Humans are still tribal and gravitate towards people who share similar values and perspectives.

We need to build strong teams of people who can function as a unit, even for short-term work. The quality of the product or service that we're buying is important, but so is the like-mindedness of the people who deliver it. Find stripes that compliment yours.